Draft:Center for Creative Leadership

• Comment: This article needs broader third-party coverage and a more encyclopedic tone. Eyesnore ^talk💬 14:12, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is a nonprofit educational organization based in Greensboro, North Carolina, that studies how leaders are developed and runs leadership development programs globally for managers and executives.^[1][2] It was founded in 1970 by H. Smith Richardson Jr., who had served as president of the Vick Chemical Company, after years of foundation-backed research into leadership and creativity and at a time when executive and management education were expanding and leadership development was still a relatively new field.^[3][4][5] CCL’s programs and research focus on how leaders learn through assessment, feedback, challenge, and workplace experience.^[2]

History

CCL grew out of work supported by the Richardson Family Foundation, which began funding research on leadership and creativity in 1957.^[1][6] Richardson founded the center after concluding that organizations needed better ways to prepare new leaders and build stable companies during periods of change.^[5][6] CCL introduced its Leadership Development Program (LDP) in 1974 and developed the Looking Glass experience, an organizational behavioral simulation built around a fictitious company, in 1978.^[1][7]

By the late 1980s, the Los Angeles Times described CCL as a research and training organization in Greensboro with additional centers in Colorado Springs and San Diego, and reported that more than 15,000 managers attended its programs in 1987.^[8] CCL established its Brussels campus in 1990, and opened an Asia office in Singapore in 2003.^[1]

In 2006, The Wall Street Journal reported that CCL had campuses in Brussels, Singapore, Greensboro, Colorado Springs, and San Diego, and served leaders from more than 2,000 organizations across the public, private, nonprofit, and education sectors.^[9] In 2014, the Financial Times placed CCL fourth in its combined global executive education ranking, with a rank of fourth for custom programs and ninth for open-enrollment.^[10]

Programs and methods

CCL offers both open-enrollment leadership programs and custom training engagements for single organizations.^[2] Its curriculum uses developmental assessment, multisource feedback, simulations, coaching, and follow-through planning intended to translate feedback into behavioral change.^[2][11] As reported by Harvard Business School, its executive and manager courses draw participants from client organizations. Before participants arrive, they and their workplace colleagues receive assessment tools, whose results CCL uses to help increase self-awareness and shape development plans.^[1]

Introduced in 1978, the Looking Glass simulation placed participants in charge of a fictitious glass manufacturer, confronted them with managerial problems under time pressure, and then returned them to those decisions in debriefs.^[7][12] Independent accounts described the exercise as an experiential method for surfacing decision patterns, interpersonal effects, and blind spots that can be hard to see in lecture-based training alone.^[8][12] Catalog records note that the simulation was produced with support from the Office of Naval Research.^[7]

CCL’s Leadership Development Program combines pre-course assessment, face-to-face feedback sessions, coaching, peer learning, and post-program goal management designed to carry development back into the workplace.^[1] CCL launched LeaderLab in Greensboro in 1991 as a six-month program built around 360-degree feedback, process-adviser coaching, learning journals, and workplace application between sessions.^[13]

Research and publications

The Encyclopedia of Career Development identifies CCL’s historical research focus on individual leader development as well as leadership and diversity.^[2]

One central area of CCL research explores how managers and executives learn, arguing that they develop chiefly through assignments, relationships, and hardships encountered on the job rather than through classroom instruction alone.^[2] That idea is reflected in the 70-20-10 model, which Princeton University Human Resources states was developed by Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger, and Michael Lombardo at CCL.^[14] In that framework, 70 percent of development comes from experience, 20 percent from feedback and other people, and 10 percent from formal training.^[14][15]

A 1987 Los Angeles Times review of Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Can Women Reach the Top of America’s Largest Corporations? credited the book to Ann M. Morrison, Randall P. White, Ellen Van Velsor, and the Center for Creative Leadership, and said it drew on a three-year study of women managers.^[16] A 2013 review article later identified Morrison, White, and Van Velsor’s 1987 work as one of the first studies to examine the effect of women’s leadership on company performance.^[17]

Another research stream concerns executive derailment, the pattern in which once-promising managers stall, fail, or are removed because of behavioral problems, damaged relationships, or difficulty adapting to broader roles.^[18][19] A 2008 article reports that CCL conducted derailment research in the 1980s and followed it with a second study published in 1996.^[18] A 2024 review article describes one behavioral school of leader derailment research as associated mainly with CCL researchers.^[20]

Leadership models and tools

CCL’s approach to developmental evaluation centers on 360-degree assessment.^[2][11] In this model, managers receive feedback from multiple people in their working environment (typically supervisors, peers, and direct reports), rather than from a single evaluator.^[11]

In its case study of CCL, Harvard Business School reports that multisource feedback sits at the center of the organization’s assessment approach and that one early CCL instrument, SKILLSCOPE, began in 1986 as part of the Looking Glass experience.^[1] A 2015 peer-reviewed article describes Benchmarks, developed through research at CCL, as a 360-degree leadership instrument used to evaluate leadership effectiveness.^[1][21]

The U.S. Army’s DPMAP guidance attributes the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) feedback model to CCL.^[22] The model structures feedback by asking the speaker to describe the situation, the specific behavior observed, and its impact.^[22]

In a 2008 Leadership Quarterly article by six CCL scholars, Wilfred H. Drath, Cynthia D. McCauley, Charles J. Palus, Ellen Van Velsor, Patricia M. G. O’Connor, and John B. McGuire proposed direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) as an alternative ontology of leadership.^[23] Their article argued that leadership should be understood not simply through the traits of a single leader with followers, but in terms of the outcomes they achieve: the production of shared direction, coordinated work, and commitment among people working together.^[23]

References

External links

Official website